Visual Scripting - Colony Ship Simulator

Overview:

A short project designed to demonstrate the depth of complexity and interaction a designer can create in a game engine with simple art skills and visual scripting software. For this project I used Unity and a state machine plug-in for the editor called Playmaker to create a simulator prototype.

Colony Ship Simulator tasks the player with maintaining the well-being of a huge colony ship as it travels over a time-scale of years to reach its destination. The player repairs and upgrades systems of the ship while having to handle various decisions, dilemmas and disasters.

The demo shows many statistical systems that work together to create both rules of play and actions the player can take. The screens provided show some of the amazing things that visual scripting can provide to developers.

Visual Scripting Examples

Game Start Manager

A simple manager which runs after loading the game. Giving players context into what the objective of the game is and if they want to play the tutorial or not, followed by choosing a dificulty setting.

Disasters Manager

A branching manager that determins which disaster the player has to deal with every few in-game months.

This manager includes determining how many in-game days until the next disaster spawns, the type of disaster spawning and any other additional conditions related to that disaster.

Resources Manager

A manager used on each system of the ship. It manages the surrent state of the system and whether or not its currently in an operating state, damaged state, repairing state, offline state or upgrading state.

Each system has up to 3 upgrade levels that the player can pay resources and time to build.